Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

In the days before the excellent Wordspy took a long vacation from sending us emails daily, one day’s offering intrigued me no end. Not the new vocabulary word it showcased, but the section called “Words About Words.” It gave a quotation from a new book telling about how, though we have invented amazing technologies for saving data, we run the risk of losing our personal, family and cultural stories. We broadcast our voices over vast distances but hardly know our neighbors. The book was Suddenly They Heard Footsteps by American-born storyteller and writer Dan Yashinsky, living in Canada.

It was the title of the book that attracted me. I had to know the significance of it. But I could find no reference to the book in any of the local bookstores; neither could they order it for me. I tried Amazon.com to no avail. However, in the process of fooling around with Amazon, I discovered Amazon Canada. I got the book at a great discount, but the cost of postage brought the price back up to the stated retail price. Oh, well . . .

Early in the book, I came to a delightful story in which the author’s three-year-old son was going to bed but fighting going to sleep. His mother began telling him a soporific story that went something like this: “The little rabbits are sleepy and are closing their eyes and going to sleep. The little chickens are sleepy and are closing their eyes. The little piggies are sleepy and are closing their eyes. The little ducklings are sleepy and are closing their eyes.” When she had covered all the little farm animals she could think of, and supposing the boy to be asleep, he raised his head from the pillow and said, “Suddenly they heard footsteps.” The author was illustrating that little children know when a story is a story and when it is not. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Children recognize bluffing. Therefore, this mother had to continue the story and have it make sense while the boy sat up to listen.

Soon after that I lost interest in the book, especially when it began to have political overtones. I eventually settled on the idea that the author had possibly fled to Canada to escape military draft in the USA. Such a move might have resulted in his writings' being banned in his native country, perhaps a just ruling.